Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic OC Edition Review

Introduction:

At this point, ATI and its partners like Sapphire have filled out their 5-series product stack so that it pretty much covers all the way from the $50 Sapphire HD 5450 all the way up to the King Daddy $650 plus Sapphire HD 5970 OC. There is not a price point left open, or is there? Sapphire has already released the Vapor-X equipped HD 5870 and has now dropped the Toxic HD 5850 to compete for the enthusiasts dollar. Sapphire has a proven track record of delivering unique cards that are a step above the reference cards they are competing against. You have the Atomic Edition cards that are the top of the performance heap with the Toxic and Vapor-X editions in just underneath. So, not only does Sapphire have the reference side of the fence covered, they have the enthusiast sector covered as well.

The Sapphire Toxic HD 5850 is an overclocked video card built with the ATI Cypress core. This card comes from Sapphire with clock speeds of 765Mhz on the core and 1050Mhz on the 1Gb of GDDR5 memory. These clock speeds are 40Mhz and 50Mhz higher than the reference version to increase the performance level for the gamer. But performance is not the only thing you get. You get the benefits of Stream technology, Eyefinity, HDMI 1.3 support, On chip HDCP and the power savings delivered by way of ATI's powerplay technology. Let's see if the Toxic HD 5850 can offer game changing results.

Closer Look:

The packaging of the Sapphire Toxic HD5850 features a cloaked figure instead of having "Ruby" grace the front cover. The front panel covers a lot of ground on the features of the Toxic edition 5850. These features listed include Eyefinity, onboard HDMI and DisplayPort, CrossFireX capability, 2+Teraflops of compute power, the 1GB of GDDR5 memory and that his card employs Vapor-X cooling and is a factory overclocked model. The back panel goes into more detail of the features of the HD 58XX series that include ATI Stream technology and DirectX 11 support. The bottom of the box shows that this product is RoHS compliant with the packaging being made from 100% recyclable materials - a big step toward helping the earth.

Inside the outer sleeve, you have the box that contains the Toxic and its accessories. Opening this up you can see that the Toxic is in a formed cardboard tray with a small foam block to keep the Toxic in place during transit. Under the card you have the box that contains the accessory bundle.

The bundle of accessories included with the Toxic HD 5850 includes what you need to get the card hooked up and a little bit more. You get the manual, driver disk, Software from Arcsoft, two 4-pin to 6-pin PCIe power adapters, CrossFire bridge connection, and last, but not least, the DVI to VGA adapter.